The physical injuries healed first, and fastest.

Bruises fade.

Bones knit.

The body is built to recover from a beating, given time.

What took far longer, what I had not expected and was not prepared for, was the way the trauma had rewired something deeper.

For weeks, I would wake in the night gasping for air if I heard loud footsteps in a hallway.

A door closing too hard could stop my heart.

My therapist explained it to me patiently: that my body, after ten years of escalating threat culminating in a beating, was still trapped in survival mode, still scanning for danger, still bracing for a blow that was no longer coming.